This book (first published in 1953) is one of the most surprising texts to emerge out of the American academy in the aftermath of World War II. That conflagration confronted philosophers with unparalleled intellectual and moral challenges that, in the minds of a few penetrating critics, had paralyzed the then-dominant idealist and analytic philosophies. One of these thinkers was the philosopher John Daniel Wild (1902-1972). Wild claimed to have rediscovered in ancient Greece ethical and authentically metaphysical answers sufficient to comprehend, and illuminate a path out of, the new postmodern social chaos and personal, existential suffering. A provocative claim, then and now.

Deserving to be ranked with Eric Voegelin (who cited the present work in Plato and Aristotle), Leo Strauss, and Robert Cushman, Wild here attempts to refute those who take Plato as an irrational dogmatist, totalitarian propagandist, or an enemy of every form of popular rule. Wild then seeks to clear away another set of misconceptions about the natural law tradition, which was commenced, as Wild ably shows, by Plato and Aristotle, a doctrine whose later history Wild also outlines. Finally, reasoning from within the classical natural-law tradition, Wild closes his book with a captivating engagement with contemporary ethical problems, including the nature of obligation and human action, essense and existence, and the relationships between ethics, metaphysics, and science.

John Daniel Wild (Ph.D., Chicago) was a distinguished professor of philosophy at Harvard (1927-1961), Northwestern University (1961-1963), Yale University (1963-1969), and the University of Florida in Gainesville (1969-1970).

Christopher Oleson, Traditio series editor, is a senior fellow at the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person and is an associate professor of philosophy at the Thornwood Center for Higher Studies.